Piano = Pet + Car Continued

[Z! Reinhardt]

Dear List --

Here is a continuation of something I started about a week ago about pianos
as being a cross between a pet and a car.  Yes, this is a hodge-podge of
thoughts more than it is anything concise, focused, and carefully thought
out.  If anybody cares to offer additional insights, I'd love to hear them!

Like a car, a piano need regular maintenance.  We all know that car
maintenance is more than an engine tune-up.  Likewise, there is more to
piano service than merely tuning the strings.  There's also the regulation
and voicing, and in some cases,
the player mechanism.  Afterall, there's no real point to having a tune-up
done
on your car if the steering, suspension, and brakes were so bad that you
couldn't drive it anywhere.

When a customer questions my interest in working on their piano's action, I
often explain that what I'm doing is "tuning" the action for better
functioning and control, much like working on a car's suspension for better
steering and control.  Likewise, the dampers could be viewed as the brakes
in that they have to stop the strings from sounding.  The brakes should be
able to slow down and stop a car without causing the car to pull one way or
the other.  The dampers ought to be capable of stopping all of the strings
simultaneously without distorting the sound or leaving a string still
sounding.

But time and time again I have attended classes in which someone asked how
it
was determined that such-n-such (name a regulation step) should be done. 
The response was almost inevitably, "the piano will tell you"  as if it
were alive, like a pet.  It's true.  Numerical regulation specs aside, they
*know* what feels best to them, and the next one might have a slightly
different *opinion* on the same subject (for example, aftertouch).  Same
goes for determining tuning stretch.  Each piano is different -- we all
know that.

Like a pet, a piano often becomes a member of the family.  People often
select their pianos based on some non-verbal, inexplicable feeling, in
addition to all that is physically in front of them, similar to how they
select pets.  I've heard many customers talk about how they fell in love
with a particular piano, despite there being others identical to it on the
salesfloor.  My favorite story was about a 9-year-old girl who was allowed
to pick out her own piano.  The parents weren't too thrilled with its
peculiar looks, say nothing that it was the most expensive in this
particular batch of used pianos, but it was obvious that the girl had
seriously befriended this one piano.  Another customer reported that she
drove all over metro Detroit covering a 100-mile radius checking out every
last piano on every sales floor of a particular make and model.  There was
something about just one piano on one floor that "spoke" to this customer. 
She couldn't explain it, but there was something about it that compelled
her to select the piano.  "It was like, it was speaking to me, and I was
falling in love with it -- it had selected me and wanted me to get to know
it better ..."

We all know about the pianos that are handed down through the generations. 
They're old, and many of them are in need of extensive work, but they had
been well-loved through the years.  Parting with them is often more than a
family could bear for emotional reasons.  Like some cars, some pianos are
worth restoring.  Like all pets, they do get old to the point where
enjoying family life is something of the past.  Sometimes they age
gracefully, but sometimes they don't, and it all depends on how well their
health and well-being had been looked after by the family.

On a tragic note about 3 years ago, a 9' concert grand was *killed* in a
freak delivery accident.  It had been a favorite of many visiting concert
artists. 
Quite a few of them summed up the situation as losing a friend.  I still
remember vividly the night I heard about the accident.  It had recently
become my favorite to service on-site, and I was just getting better
acquainted with it and was looking forward to what I hoped would be a long
succession of encounters with it.  I knew I would miss it.  (I couldn't
believe the other technician when he told me, "The way I look at it was
that it was just another piano ..."  I don't think he would say the same
thing of his cat if anything like that happened to him.)

Yes, I have to admit ... there are a great number of customers who view
their pianos strictly as machines, capable of withstanding abuse and
neglect to a certain degree.  These are the people I have the hardest time
communicating with, because they don't like the idea of the piano having a
life of its own.  Well OK, I'll treat these pianos as if they were cars. 
By the time I'm done servicing them, they should at least be capable of
playing/not-playing the notes on-key upon demand.  I have also known other
technicians who view their
customers' pianos as "just plain pianos ... all in a day's work."  Great! 
A perfect match.  Refer these customers to these technicians and they'll
get *mechanized* service.  They might get a *great* tuning and a *perfect*
regulation according to all available specifications out of this
arrangement, but there will be no *feeling* or emotion behind it.  Makes me
wonder how these people experience music ... is it just a sequence of notes
over a space of time?  (Perhaps this is another topic now.)

As far as I am concerned, Music is like any other art --  a very personal,
highly subjective form of expression.  How it speaks to each of us
emotionally is very much an
individual matter despite its close relationship to mathematics.  The job
of the piano is to reproduce the feeling of the music as well as play the
notes.  There are individual difference between pianos much like there are
individual differences in how different dogs will perform the same trick.

No doubt many of you will have questions and further insights about this. 
All I'm trying to do is to get the customer thinking about just what the
piano might be all about to their families in its role as a music educator.
 What it takes to help it fulfil its role is what the car+pet analogy is
all about.  It is always my hope that it is a a member of the family
capable of teaching family values such as patience, practice,
perserverence, and so on.  Pianos take maintenance, yes, but they should be
able to give back love.

Z! Reinhardt RPT
Ann Arbor  MI
diskladame@provide.net